Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church
Thanksgiving
November 23, 2014
John Buchanan
I suspect I’m not the only one who was taught the habit of gratitude before the feeling of gratitude arrived. I’m not sure that children come with thankful hearts. I didn’t. In fact, it is my conclusion that children come with a sense of entitlement. A constant sense of irritation in my home was my procrastination when it came to expressing a conventional “thank you.” It was usually a birthday card with a few dollars tucked inside from my grandmother. “Have you called and thanked her yet?” “No, but I will.” It went on for days. “Have you thanked her yet?” “No, not yet, but I will, I promise.” Finally, I was firmly escorted to the telephone, and she stood over me while I called and thanked my grandmother who, by the way, was a real sweetheart, generous and patient too. She kept at it, well into adulthood until I finally got it, until the feeling of gratitude caught up with other feelings, and for her tenacity I am deeply grateful.
I love Thanksgiving because it is institutionalizing the habit and practice of gratitude. For many of us Thanksgiving has become the favorite holiday, precisely because our market economy has never learned to exploit it: no Thanksgiving gifts, a few cards, not many Thanksgiving parties to attend – just a quiet day and a great meal to remind us of simple but important truths: the goodness of the earth, the delight of good food, the gift of family and friends, and the reality of gratitude. And – Advent is just around the corner.
Thanksgiving and praising God are at the heart of the faith of ancient Israel. Israel’s hymnbook, our Book of Psalms, is full of exuberant praise and gratitude to the Creator:
Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth
Enter his gates with thanksgiving, and his courts with praise
Give thanks to him and bless his name
Mark Douglas, who teaches at Columbia Seminary, says that according to the Psalms, “giving praise is almost the most natural thing human beings can do.” Another scholar writes that the Psalms are “so effusive in praise, so over the top in the declaration of God’s goodness that it sounds like a love letter from someone newly smitten.” [Wallace B, Feasting on the Word, p. 145]
Israel’s idea, unique in the ancient world, was that creation, the world around us, created by God, is essentially good, and that its fertility, its amazing abundance – earth, rain, sun, trees, and flowers, the amazing creatures, sheep and cattle – all of it is a sign of Gods generous goodness. When you look at the world, the bible says, you see something of God. Faith in the Bible begins with an awareness of God’s good and beautiful creation and one’s place in the ongoing story of God’s constantly unfolding creation. The human response to all of that is, first, awe and then gratitude and finally praise and thanksgiving.
The great theologian Karl Barth said that when you look all around you and behold all the gifts you have been given – all you can do is “stammer praise.”
One of my favorites, the late Robert McAfee Brown, Presbyterian theologian, “The distinctive word in the Christian vocabulary is ‘grace,’ that God is gracious to us no matter how unlovable we may be. God as revealed in Jesus is a gracious God. And if grace is the distinctive word to describe God’s attitude toward us, there is also a word to describe the response we are called to make. That word is ‘gratitude.’” [The Pseudonyms of God]
Brown said the best all-purpose hymn, suitable for every occasion – birth, baptism, wedding, ordination, funeral – is the great hymn of Thanksgiving, “Now Thank We All Our God.”
Expressing gratitude is not only obligatory, it turns out to be delightful, satisfying, and healthy. C.S. Lewis famously observed that the most heartfelt people he knew, emotionally and spiritually, were the grateful ones, the ones who are always thanking. “Praise,” Lewis said, “is almost mental health made audible.” [Reflections on the Psalms]
And Walter Brueggemann: “Praise is both duty and delight. Praise articulates and embodies our capacity to abandon ourselves to trust and gratitude to the one whose we are…a human requirement but also a human delight.” [Israel’s Praise]
It occurred to me that I have given voice to praise and thanksgiving, ever since I had a voice to sing – every Sunday of my life – and perhaps you have too.
Praise god from whom all blessings flow
Praise God all creatures here below
Praise God above ye heavenly host
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
There is a great story in the New Testament about gratitude, and health and wholeness – the story of Jesus and the ten lepers. Leprosy was the scourge of life in first century Palestine. The word leprosy, we now know, referred to any kind of skin disease, some of which were serious, and contagious and fatal. A priest made the diagnosis of Leprosy, and the decision that the infected person had to be separated from the community, much like Ebola today, separated even from family, spouse, children. People with Leprosy lived on the margins of society, usually in small groups, subsisting on begging – from a distance, and whatever food their families left for them. Ten Lepers approached Jesus. From a distance they call out, “Jesus, master, have mercy on us.” “Go see the priest,” he tell them, and on the way, their Leprosy, whatever it is, disappears, so that the priest, when he examines them, declares that they are clean, fit and safe for life in the community again. It is a momentous, great occasion, I see them running full speed, shouting, embracing their wives and children and parents. One of the ten returns to find Jesus, falls at his feet in profound gratitude. Jesus’ response is interesting. “Were not ten made clean?” The other nine, where are they? None of them except this one – who is a foreigner, an immigrant, returned to give thanks to God.” And to the man who did return to express gratitude, he says, “Get up and go your way. Your faith has made you well.” The nine are healed…This man, who expressed his gratitude is more than healed. His gratitude has made him whole.
When you cultivate and practice the habit of gratitude, the experience of gratitude deepens over the years. The late John Updike, near the end of his life, wrote a personal memoir, Self Consciousness. He wrote: “I am now in my amazed, insistent appreciation of the planet with its scenery and weather – that pathetic discovery the old make that every day and every season has its beauty – that even a walk to the mailbox is a precious experience…Aging,” he wrote, “calls us outdoors after the adult indoors of work…we come again to love the plain world, stones and wood, air and water. The act of seeing itself is glorious and of hearing and feeling and tasting.” (p. 246)
“My God, it’s good to be alive,” University of Chicago theologian Langdon Gilley used to say.
I try to read a little poetry and one of the reasons is that poets teach us and remind us to pay attention. One of my favorites is Mary Oliver, who lives on the tip of Cape Cod and named her cottage “Gratitude.” Her poems are about seeing, noticing, awe, wonder and gratitude. In a poem she called “Praying:”
It doesn’t have to be the
blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones, just
pay attention, then
patch a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest, but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence
in which another voice may speak
[Thirst: Poems by Mary Oliver, p. 37]
But – can you thank and praise God when things are not well with you, when you are not feeling particularly grateful; when you have lost your job, or are shattered by the loss of a loved one and are in the profound pain of grief, or when a long-held hope just dissolved, when a dream died. We must be cautious here. Nothing is more unkind and unhelpful than to insist that someone try to be happy who is not at all happy, to smile when your heart is breaking. But gratitude is deeper and, in a real sense, more profound in difficulty and tragedy. It is precisely in the valley of the shadow when words of thanks are drawn out of us. “Yes, even now – thank you God, thank you for your love, your presence: thank you for you.”
Remember how it was for the ones who first began the tradition. 102 of them set out from Plymouth Harbor, England, on September 6, 1620. 65 days later they sighted land. Fully half of their number died during that first long, cold New England winter. Every family lost someone: infants died; the elderly who survived the journey died during the winter: husbands lost wives, wives lost husbands, parents lost children, children lost parents to hunger, disease and the relentless cold.
One historian says: “By all rights none of the Pilgrims should have emerged from the first winter alive. That it worked out differently was a testament to their resolve and faith.” [Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War, Nathaniel Philbrick]
Thanks to friendly natives, crops were planted, fertilized and somehow grew and so, at the very edge of disaster, with every heart still broken at the loss of a loved one, they set aside a day for thanksgiving.
I am grateful that I learned – was taught the habit of gratitude. Throughout my childhood and youth and into college, my mother always insisted that we attend Wednesday night Thanksgiving Eve services – over my protests. I didn’t much like them. They were usually community services: several churches got together because none of them could muster a respectable crowd alone. They were still consistently under-attended, not very well put on. “Why do we have to go to church?” I asked every year. “The sermon isn’t going to be any good; the combined choir isn’t really into it and won’t amount to much, there won’t be many people there. Can’t we just stay at home for once?”
“We’re going,” she said, “because of the hymns – the Thanksgiving hymns. They’re the best hymns in the book. So, if we don’t do anything else, we’re going to sing ‘Come Ye Thankful People Come’ and ‘Now Thank We All Our God.’”
So we did, and I’m grateful.
Thanks be to God.